1. Field of the Invention
The invention relates to crystal oscillators and, more particularly, to a highly stable, single-chip voltage control crystal oscillator with automatic gain control.
2. Description of the Related Art
Radio frequency communication technologies have made dramatic advances in the past several years. For example, the applications for wireless communications technology have increased many fold and the subscribers who use such wireless communications have grown dramatically in number. The increased utilization of digital modulation techniques, such as time division multiple access (TDMA) and code division multiple access (CDMA) along with the substantial growth in traffic density over systems implementing these modulation techniques requires both closer carrier frequency spacing and decreased modulation bandwidth. The frequency stability of reference oscillators has become increasingly important in this environment.
While crystal-controlled oscillators have been used for decades in electronic systems as frequency references, such oscillators vary widely in their different characteristics such as output waveform, frequency stability and amplitude stability under various loads, temperature and power supply conditions. Many such oscillators have been implemented using bi-polar transistors as active elements. However, the dominant technology for the fabrication of most integrated circuits today is CMOS and design techniques for highly stable crystal oscillators in this technology are less well known.
As mentioned above, high performance wireless telecommunication applications require very accurate frequency reference sources. The accuracy and frequency stability of an oscillator is, in general, affected by various factors such as production, temperature and aging variations, that require oscillator frequency variations to be compensated. Most prior art oscillator circuit configurations which include compensation circuitry have included those compensation circuits as external to the integrated circuit containing the oscillator itself. This is more costly from a manufacturing standpoint as well as less compact from a miniaturization perspective, a very important factor in contemporary design of wireless devices.
Two important elements in the design of highly stable crystal oscillator circuits are the control of power consumption by the oscillator itself and frequency compensation of the oscillator for both production variations and for temperature variations during operation. Prior art techniques such as those shown in U.S. Pat. No. 5,548,252 to Watanabi et al. have attempted to address these issues. This patent discloses a digital temperature compensated crystal oscillator which includes certain features relevant to frequency stable crystal oscillators; however, the technique used for power consumption control, a very important element in the design of a crystal oscillator for use in wireless communication devices such as cellular subscriber terminals, and the frequency compensation techniques are significantly different and less advantageous than those incorporated in the oscillator of the present invention.